WILBUR

FISK (1792-1839)  , American educationist, was born in Brattleboro, Vermont, on the 31st of August 1792 . He studied at the university of Vermont in 1812-1814, and then entered Brown University, where he graduated in 1815 . He studied law, and in 1817 came under the influence of a religious revival in Vermont, where at Lyndon in the following year he was licensed as a local preacher and was admitted to the New England conference . His influence with the conference turned that body from its opposition to higher education as immoral in tendency to the establishment of secondary schools and colleges . Upon the removal in 1824 of the conference's academy at New Market, New Hampshire, to Wilbraham, Massachusetts, Fisk became one of its agents and trustees, and in 1826 its principal . He drafted the report of the committee on education to the general conference in 1828, at which time he declined the bishopric of the Canada conference . He was first president of Wesleyan University from the opening of the university in 1831 until his death on the 22nd of February 1839 in Middle-town, Connecticut . His successful administration of the Wesleyan Academy at Wilbraham and of Wesleyan University were remark-able . He was an able controversialist, and in the interests of Arminianism attacked both New England Calvinism and Unitarianism; he published in 1837 The Calvinistic Controversy . He also wrote Travels on the Continent of Europe (1838) . See Le and Writings of Wilbur Fisk (New York, 1842), edited by Joseph Holdich, and the biography by George Prentice (Boston, 1890), in the American Religious Leaders Series; also a sketch in Memoirs of Teachers and Educators (Nevg York, 1861), edited by Henry Barnard .